thirty minute boil?

i searched, and didn't see anything about this. more of a curiosity thing than anything, but everything i've ever read/heard about has either been 60minute or 90 minute boils.

my austin homebrew "blue moon" clone kit directions called for 45 minutes of steeping the grains, and only a 30 minute boil. (1/2oz cascade for 30 minutes, coriander/orange peel for 15 minutes, 1/2oz cascade for 5 minutes)

my 2nd beer a hefeweizen, called for only 30 minutes of steeping the grains, and a 60minute boil. (1oz of tettnang at beginning of 60 minute boil.)


so was my austin homebrew "30 minute boil" a typo? should it have been a 60 minute boil? just curious, when i racked to secondary my brew tasted watered down, which i thought could possibly be attributed to a 30 minute boil, but at the time, it was my first brew, and i just read the directions, and did what they said.

thanks.

brian

If thats all the time needed to extract the correct IBU's out of the hops then it sounds right. If I recall what blue moon tastes like correctly, hoppy doesn't come to mind. I would say it is correct, but you may call them to make sure, if worst come to worst it just will be a little malty tasting, its still beer, will probably still be good.

Good luck

The length of boil has more to do with bittering hop extraction than anything else.

Usually if you shorten your boil from 1 hour you have to double your bittering hops. A 1/2 oz seems really too low. Check similar recipes.

A 30 minute boil for a low IBU ale (like blue moon) will retain some of the flavor from the hops as well as adding the bittering. It is relatively rare, but I have several recipes that use short boils.

If you are working from a kit that has good instructions (and I put AHB in this class), follow them unless you have done the kit before and are intentionally changing them.

The long steep time will extract more bitter orange peel and coriander flavor which is normal with that brew. The short boil keeps the beer lighter in color. There are minimal amounts of hops used in this style.

Im my last batches of wit I've had good success with steeping the orange and coriander in 3.5 gallons of water in the brew pot while it heats up to boil. As soon as it gets up around ~180 I yank the grain bag and stick it in another 10qt pot with 1 gallon of 160° water and steep it until my main boil has 10 minutes left. At that time, I yank the grain bag from the 1 gallon pot, crank on the 3rd burner and quickly bring it close to boil. I dump that gallon in with the rest of the batch for the last 5-10 minutes. I end up with about 4 gallons total, ~3 of it was from the DME+hop boil, and the last gallon is purely spice water.

I made a blonde that only had 12 IBUs. I got away with a 30 minute boil on that one. Beer tasted and looked great too.

I actually do boils that last from 30-50mins on a regular basis, but I've been making low-bitterness beers for the most part. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I'd recommend downloading a program like BeerSmith, and then plugging in your recipes. You can start to see how much bitterness you're going to get from various boil times and hop quantities.